Course dedication

Blocks ::: block_dedication

Maintained by

Dan Marsden,

Catalyst IT

This block allows to calculate estimated dedication time of participants within a course.

Latest release: 6 days

6286 sites

932 downloads

179 fans

Current versions available: 5

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NOTE: This plugin has a new maintainer.

Thanks to the University of Canterbury for sponsoring the upgrade work to support Moodle 4.0 and the new report builder API.

Introduction

This block allows to see the estimated dedication time to a Moodle course by the participants of the course.

How dedication time is estimated?

Time is estimated based in the concepts of Session and Session duration applied to Moodle's log entries:

Click: every time that a user access to a page in Moodle a log entry is stored.
Session: set of two or more consecutive clicks in which the elapsed time between every pair of consecutive clicks does not overcome an established maximum time.
Session duration: elapsed time between the first and the last click of the session.

Features

This block is intended to be used only by teachers, however the block can be configured to show dedication time to students too.

Teachers can use a tool to analyse dedication time within a course. The tool provides three reporting methods:

Dedication time of the course: calculates total dedication time, mean dedication time and connections per day for each student, which you can filter by course group if required.
Dedication of a student: detailed sessions for a student with start date & time, duration and ip.
Report builder source: The plugin includes a custom report builder source to allow for site-level reporting to be generated.

Credits
Original developed by Aday Talavera, CICEI at Las Palmas de Gran Canaria University
Updated to support Moodle 1.9 - Moodle 3.X by Borja Rubio Reyes.
Support for Moodle 4.0 was sponsored by the University of Canterbury.

Useful links

Source control URL

Bug tracker

Discussion

Screenshots

Contributors

Dan Marsden (Lead maintainer)

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Catalyst IT

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Borja Rubio Reyes: previous author

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Aday Talavera: previous maintainer

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Awards

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Comments

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Debbie McDonald
Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 8:07 AM
Is there a way to add usernames or custom profile fields to this block?
P H
Fri, Dec 16, 2022, 5:38 PM
Hello. Has this plugin been tested with Moodle 4.1? Thanks.
Dan Marsden
Fri, Dec 16, 2022, 6:04 PM
@P H - this plugin has a new maintainer. Please see the github repository for the latest version along with further details in the readme file in github, thanks!
P H
Fri, Dec 16, 2022, 6:19 PM
@Dan Thanks and have a good day!
P H
Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:42 PM
Hello @Dan,
I downloaded the plugin from Github and installed it on my Moodle 4.1 website and now I can't access the course which have this block. I get an "Error reading from database".
I have included the complete Error log here:
https://github.com/catalyst/moodle-block_dedication/issues/67
Steve Radford
Wed, Feb 8, 2023, 6:16 PM
Hi @Dan, thanks for taking over the support for this plugin. Can I ask how you're getting on with updating this for Moodle 4.x? We're really keen to upgrade our site but this plugin is highly useful for our teachers, so we're currently holding off doing so, but it would be helpful if we could understand your timeline.

(I'm aware you / Catalyst are essentially doing this work for free, and as I've mentioned on numerous threads, it would be great if Moodle would allow users to contribute or reward maintainers like you in some way - so if there's anything we can do to help please let me know).
Dan Marsden
Thu, Feb 9, 2023, 4:23 AM
Hi Steve - we were funded by Canterbury University to do the initial tidy up work here and it is in a generally stable/working state for Moodle 4.0 and 4.1, it is just missing Group support which I'd hoped to fix before publishing into the plugins db. - No timeframe on that at this stage sorry, but hopefully in the next few months I'll come back to it. If you would like to fund feature development feel free to reach out privately.
Steve Radford
Thu, Feb 9, 2023, 8:45 PM
Hi Dan, the group support feature would be a nice addition, but it isn't business-critical to us, so how about this. If you can publish a V4.1 compatible plugin into the plugins db without that feature, I'll PM you now so we can see whether I can also support the development of that as an additional feature for the next release. (I'll PM you about that now).
Steve Radford
Thu, Feb 9, 2023, 8:53 PM
Dan, for some reason Moodle.org says I can't message you directly, so I've grabbed your details from the contact page of the personal site listed in your bio and have dropped you an email that way.
Joseph Liaw
Thu, Feb 9, 2023, 9:55 PM
Hi Dan: If you need someone to help test out changes, I'd be happy to help beta test and give feedback. The plugin is super useful, and still useful since it would primarily be used by teachers to see student time spent on a course, and the privacy issue could be easily handled by just hiding the block from students. Another great feature to have would be if the dedication block could handle course meta enrollments (e.g. have a cohort of students like "Year 1" that are enrolled in a core set of classes, and then use the dedication block and meta enrollment to see how much time is spent across the core classes.
Dan Marsden
Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 4:37 AM
@Steve thanks - will touch base separately.
@Joseph - yes all feedback is useful - grab the latest from github and report any issues you find there. We use the new Moodle report builder api which allows the admin to set up various custom reports, although I can't remember if Core has added support for reporting on cohorts yet.
CRYPTLAN FORMACION
Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 9:03 PM
hello, any timeline to have ready the block for moodle 4?
Dan Marsden
Tue, Feb 14, 2023, 3:20 AM
@Fer - please see previous comments here and the code in github
Vital Uran
Fri, Mar 3, 2023, 7:16 PM
Hi Dan, i deleted most of the logs during migration to 4.1, and now at the migrated site i cant see any of the times spent, or no new additional times are added. am i looking at the wrong place (report builder)?
Dan Marsden
Wed, Mar 8, 2023, 7:22 AM
@Vital, this plugin relies on the logs data to generate time spent, if you have deleted the logs, then it will not be able to calculate historical times. Also keep in mind that it uses a scheduled task to generate the data, so if you do not have cron running correctly it will not be able to generate the stats.